Commando (7 page)

Jake held on to his patience. “You’d be walking right into the lion’s mouth by doing that.”

“I didn’t come here to turn tail and run, Jake.”

“Parking in his backyard isn’t cowardly, it’s foolhardy.”

Shah ignored the low fury in his voice. “Well, it’s not your problem, is it?”

“Why the hell isn’t it?”

“Because you don’t believe in what I’m trying to do, that’s why! You’re not committed to anything.”

Anger frayed his patience, but Jake remained sitting on the log. He knew that if he got up and towered over Shah, it would only make her more defensive. “You don’t know me well enough to say that,” he answered, struggling to keep his tone even. “In fact, you’ve gone out of your way to pretend I don’t exist.”

Shah quickly braided the rest of her hair. Her fingers were trembling, and she wondered if Jake saw just how much he affected her. She knew for a fact that if not for Jake’s shadowy presence in all their lives, more people might have died last night—during the attack, or later, in the hospital. Still, she couldn’t admit it.

“I came down here to get proof that these land barons are destroying our rain forest,” she insisted. “Not only that, I
know
that Hernandez is illegally using chain saws to cut down those trees. That’s against Brazilian law, you know.” She glared at Jake. “I want to nail that slimy bastard’s hide to the wall with his own country’s laws. I want him taken off the board as a player. But I need proof. All of these barons use illegal chain saws instead of axes or hand-held saws. My plan is to seek them out, videotape them and land them in jail. I may not be able to single-handedly stop the destruction of this basin, but I sure can slow it down.”

Jake assimilated Shah’s impassioned explanation, forcing himself not to speak for several minutes, allowing the tension to dissolve. She’d finished braiding her hair and was putting on her white cotton socks when he finally spoke.

“I didn’t know it was against Brazilian law for these guys to use chain saws. In the U.S., all the loggers use them.”

Shah jerked laces through the eyelets of her hiking boot. “Brazil is caught between a rock and a hard place, Jake. They’ve got millions of poor in the cities, and they’re hurting. To try and ease the situation, the government gives them small parcels of farmland. These people can cut down trees with axes or saws, to clear the land for farming. That might be all right, but greedy businessmen have been buying up the small plots from the poor and contracting countries like Japan to buy the trees. It’s a very big,
very
profitable business.”

Shah quickly finished lacing up her boots. With a frustrated sound, she faced Jake. “Brazil is taking a lot of heat from the world scientific community and from ecological groups. But they’ve got runaway inflation, and the people are in turmoil. Brazil is getting squeezed inside and out by groups and factions. I see myself as a stopgap measure, Jake. I can help buy time for the rain forest in hopes that more pressure and education will make the Brazilian government realize they’ve got to stop destroying the Amazon Basin. I did it before on the Rio Negro, with another Brazilian realtor who was out to rape Mother Earth. He’s in jail right now in Rio.”

Jake’s eyes narrowed. “Does Hernandez know about this?”

“Kind of obvious he does, don’t you think?” Shah gestured toward the village. “Why else would he have attacked?”

With a nod, Jake rested his hands against his chin. “I think you’re right.”

“I know I am.”

Jake glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “You’re a pretty courageous woman.”

“I’m a warrior, Jake. I’ve always been one. It doesn’t mean I’m not afraid. I live with fear daily. All kinds of fear. The difference is, despite my fear, I’ll move forward and act on my beliefs. I won’t allow it to stop me.” She made a helpless gesture with her hand, her voice filled with frustration. “Ever since I was born, I’ve been in hot water of one kind or another. First, it was with my father, who is a closet alcoholic. He’d never admit he’s got a problem, but my mother and I sure know he does.” Shah stood suddenly, realizing she’d said too much. To reveal the pain she carried to a near stranger—who was in the employ of her father!—was dangerous, to say the least.

“Wait!” Jake leaped to his feet and covered the distance between them. He reached out and drew her to a halt. “Wait,” he entreated her softly. “Tell me more about your father.”

His touch was branding. The ache it sent through Shah was like a raw, unsettling current of longing combined with desperation. She pulled out of his grasp and looked up into his gray eyes, trying to ferret out whether he was sincere in his request.

“Why should I?” she asked challengingly.

“Because you know I care.”

“I don’t know that.”

Jake smiled slightly and relaxed. Shah stood rigidly, as if she were going to run at any moment. “Yes,” he said softly, “you
do
know that.”

Shah took several steps away from him, unable to hold his burning gray gaze or accept the tenderness he seemed to offer. “It doesn’t matter,” she said waspishly.

“You matter, Shah.”

A tremor passed through her, and she closed her eyes briefly, then turned away. “Words, just words. You men are so good with words. It’s actions that count with me, not your damnable words.”

He felt a rift in the tension, and seized the moment. Approaching Shah slowly, he kept his hands at his sides—the last place he wanted them to be. Shah was openly suffering. He could hear the anguish in her husky voice.

“My actions of the past twenty-four hours should prove something to you,” he began, his voice raw. “It sounds as if you’ve been fighting pitched battles by yourself all your life, Shah.” His eyes darkened. “This time you don’t have to fight alone.”

The gritty sound of his voice wrapped around Shah like a protective blanket. She drew in a shuddering sigh and slowly raised her head. She met and held the gaze from his narrowed gray eyes, eyes that were banked with some heated, indefinable emotion. “What are you talking about?”

His smile became grimmer. “I’ll go with you down the Amazon. We’ll find a good place to make camp, then we’ll get that tape you want.”

Stunned, Shah gasped. Her mind spun with questions, but her heart told her that Jake Randolph was more sincere than any man she’d ever met.

“Why would you do that?”

“Because I believe in your cause. I believe in you.”

She frowned. “My father is paying you.”

“So?” Jake shrugged. “My orders were to be a bodyguard if you decided to stay down here, and that’s fulfilling my assignment as far as Travers is concerned. He didn’t tell me what to do with my time. If I want to help you, I will.”

“If he knew what you wanted to do, he’d hit the ceiling,” Shah growled. “He wants me out of this place permanently.”

“Guess he won’t get his way, will he?”

Jake’s teasing broke the terrible tension she carried in her shoulders. Shah searched his harsh features ruthlessly for any sign that he was lying. Men had always lied to her.

“I don’t trust men,” she warned him throatily.

“Why?” Jake asked the question so softly that he wasn’t sure she’d heard him at first.

Her mouth compressed, Shah wrapped her arms across her chest and looked out at the river. “I never talk about my past.”

“Most kids who come from alcoholic families feel that way,” Jake said gently.

Shah’s eyes narrowed. “I suppose you’ve got a degree in psychology, too, besides philosophy?”

Grinning bashfully, Jake shook his head. “I got trained a long time ago to be more aware of other people’s feelings and motivations.” Memories of Bess pooled in his heart, and he shrugged. “An incredible woman with a heart as big as yours helped me open up and see a lot more than most men do about people and their problems.”

Curiosity stalked Shah. For just a moment, she’d seen Jake’s face lose its harsh cast. Underneath, she’d seen a man of immense sensitivity. Then that cloak of grief had surrounded him again. She swallowed hard. “You’re married?”

Jake was wrestling with real, unresolved pain. “I was…but that was a long time ago.” It hurt to breathe in that moment, and hot, unexpected tears momentarily blurred his vision, dissolving Shah’s taut features. Blinking them back, he tried to steer the conversation back to her. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “So how long did your mother tolerate your father’s alcohol problem?”

Caught off guard by the tears she saw in Jake’s eyes, Shah stood very still. She felt her way through the ravaged, haunted look on his face. She’d never seen tears in a man’s eyes before. The only tears she knew were ones shed in hurt and pain by women and children. Were Jake’s tears due to some memory, a past he couldn’t put to rest? His features remained open and accessible, and the words, the feelings, tumbled out of Shah’s mouth before she could stop them. “My mother was very young—and very beautiful—when my father met her. She was waiting tables at the best hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota, and he fell in love with her. My mother was a medicine woman in training at the time, and she tried to explain that to my father. She lived in the traditional ways of our people, but he didn’t care or want to know about my mother’s beliefs.

“My father shrugged off her explanations, dazzled her with beautiful gifts, fine food at the best restaurants, and within days they were married. I guess I was conceived the first night. But when my father wanted my mother to move away from the Rosebud reservation, where our family has land and homes, my mother said no. Her medicine teacher was there, as she’d tried to tell him days earlier. One day she’d be a medicine woman helping her people, and she couldn’t leave the reservation.”

“Your mother is a healer?” Jake asked, seeing all too clearly the suffering that speaking about her past was causing Shah.

“Yes, but that didn’t matter to him. My father started drinking, flew into a rage and beat my mother senseless. When she came to, they were driving to Denver, where he lived.” Shah’s voice died in her throat, and she shook her head. “My mother was a virtual prisoner at my father’s estate. He was jealous and guarded her. She could never go anywhere without a private detective in plain sight. He was a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, and when he drank, he beat her.”

Jake shut his eyes, buffeted by her pain. When he opened them again, he stared grimly into her distraught features. “I’m sorry,” he rasped. It took every bit of Jake’s control not to reach out and touch Shah in a gesture of humanity, but he knew that, given her distrust, she might wrongly interpret his action. The ache in his heart for her, for the tragedy that surrounded her, grew.

Shah pushed the grayish-white sand around with the toe of her boot. So much misery was surfacing as she spoke. “My mother convinced my father to let her give birth to me on the reservation. Living with him for nine months, she’d figured out how to manipulate him without making him angry enough to beat her. I was born in my grandmother’s cabin at Rosebud, and three days later we were taken back to our prison in Denver.

“I don’t have a lot of memories until I was about six years old. I do remember this huge, cold estate that was like a fortress. My father hated me. He told my mother to keep me out of his sight, to keep me quiet because he hated to hear a child crying. I remember being held by my mother, her hand pressed to my mouth if I started to cry. She used to press my face against her breast, hold me very tightly and pray that father didn’t hear me.”

Biting back a curse, Jake stood helplessly. Shah’s lower lip was trembling. It tore heavily at his own grieving heart to hear how much abuse she had endured.

“Until I was twelve years old, I remember living in a nightmare war at his house. I went to school, came home and went to my room. I had my meals served there, I did my homework there, and I played with my dog out in the big yard, which was enclosed by a black wrought-iron fence.” Shah wearily touched her brow. “As I got older, I became aware that sometimes my mother would have terrible bruises all over her. One time…one time I saw my father beating her in a drunken rage. I flew down the staircase, screaming and shouting at him to leave her alone….” Shah made a strangled sound and fell silent.

Jake moved over to her and slid his hand along her slumped shoulder. His mouth moved into a thin line as he thought of the daily suffering Shah had lived with. The anger he felt toward Travers ballooned tenfold. No wonder Shah was combative. “What happened? What did he do to you?” he asked, his voice cracking.

Shah felt Jake’s fingers tighten on her shoulder, and gathered the strength to go on. “I—Well, I was like a wild animal attacking him, I guess. I don’t really remember what happened, to tell you the truth. Mom told me about it later—after I woke up in the hospital with a severe concussion.”

“My God,” Jake choked out, reeling with shock.

She gave him a cutting look. “In those days, hospitals didn’t question a child being beaten. My mother took me to the emergency room. She was in tears when she told them that I’d fallen down the stairs. I was in the hospital for three days. On the third day, my mom came and got me. I found out later she’d stolen money from my father’s wallet and bought two bus tickets for Rosebud. We escaped. I remember being wrapped up in a nice, warm star quilt that my grandmother had made for me when I was younger. I was still dizzy, and I couldn’t walk straight, but it was sure nice to be held in her arms on that bus trip. I was so happy to be going home, I cried most of the time. My grandmother…well, she’s a wonderful woman. She loved me and my mother with a fierceness that defies description.”

Unconsciously Jake slid his hand back and forth along Shah’s shoulder. He forced out a question that he didn’t want to ask—because he wasn’t sure if he could handle hearing the answer. “Did it end there?”

“No.” She sighed. “Once we got on the res, we were legally safe from my father. He tried to get the tribal council to give him permission to take us back to Denver, but a reservation is like a foreign country, Jake. We have our own laws and ways of doing things. My mother filed for a divorce the day she arrived, and the tribal council supported her decision to stay at Rosebud. From the age of twelve until I was eighteen, I never left the res, for fear that one of father’s hired detectives might try to kidnap me. I went to the missionary school over in St. Francis, about fifteen miles from where we lived.”